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Mages are Hunters
Hunters are Hunters
All healers are Paladins
Everyone can do everything
Damage is gated by cooldown and secondary resource rather than position and cast time
Too many defensives
Healing too strong
Mortal strike too weak
Everyone can do everything
Nobody has any unique tools anymore

My initial impressions of Warlock aren't so great... It seems like currently you could probably take any Affliction comp and sub in a Boomkin and do significantly better. And since Fear and Cyclone are on the same DR now, it sort of makes more sense than it has in the past. I was playing with a Ret Paladin, so maybe that was part of the problem--maybe Affliction works better with a War/Rogue/DK.

So, I guess, I don't have a lot of input here, except that Ret+Affliction didn't seem so great.

Ice Nova is one of the best examples of PvP blindness in WoD. As I said on twitter, my best guess is that the numbers must be this way is to make it PvE DPS-competitive with the other talents on this tier.

Does a single person disagree with me that Ice Nova is a bad ability for WoW? Can anyone make an argument that it's a good ability? (if you don't have posting access here, tweet or PM me)

I'm legitimately interested, if you have an argument. I have to admit that I'm a bit baffled as to why/how it's made it this far.

people are wayyyyyy too forgetful of stuff as soon as 1 year later. you should look at the threads on the general forum from back in wrath, it should refresh your memory of all the terrible stuff.http://www.arenajunk...__all__st__9900

People are always too negative on the internet.

Wrath wasn't perfect, but the foundation of classes and abilities was better then than it is now.

seems to be a lot of thinking about something that doesn't matter that much

I think the idea is that target and focus arena1-3 would be available in the key bindings section of the WoW UI, but you couldn't put /target [@arena1] into a macro. So you'd still need at least two actions to cast something on an arbitrary arena1-3 enemy. I don't know exactly what he means by his tweets, but that's what I'm taking away.

Even though I abuse the shit out of them, I agree that arena 1-3 binds are not good for the game. They reduce the importance of court vision and contribute a huge amount to keybind bloat. I hope they do something about them in WoD.

I think you guys played so well vs the LSD, but Llama cleave really where the better team, even though they're a really hard team for you.

Thank you, but I don't think you should say anything about "better team," unless you have a whole bunch of experience playing against very good MW Monk healer teams as WLS. MW Monks are by far the hardest healer for WLS to fight, and it gets even worse when they have a curse dispel. It's a very difficult matchup, probably one of the hardest counters I'm aware of in MoP.

Of course, Ald's team played great, (and may well be better than us) but this is yet another reason why brackets are really bad in a WoW tournament.

We are all firearms yes but some of us are only handguns compared to the full automatic assault rifles the others are. Clearly the assault rifle is better but people still try and argue the fact that they both do the same thing so it's balanced and fine.

There needs to be comparisons drawn between every class and look at what tools they have against each other. And clearly some classes just out shine everything else currently.

The problem is that you're making an argument without any regard for the larger context. If WoW was a game where a Warlock's only spell was Fear and Hunters only had Scatter Trap, balance would be wildly off. But WoW is not that game.

You're comparing a small part of one class' kit to a small part of another class' kit, and drawing bad, overly general conclusions from that comparison. You have to compare the full Hunter kit to the full Warlock kit, and frankly, that's really fucking hard to do with just words on a forum. That comparison needs to happen in game, with ladder rankings and player experience as the two main factors. I would argue that Warlocks are not wildly stronger than Hunters right now. Warlocks are probably better, but not by a massive amount. Both classes have comps they can do very well in.

Even if Warlocks were massively stronger than Hunters, the best course of action is not to just take one area where they are different than Hunters and simply make them the same. There are much better fixes that you could do to balance the game, while still keeping different classes feeling different. I don't want every caster spec to be a tmorphed Hunter, and you shouldn't want that either.

I really can't believe people still argue how it is balanced when if you lay it out on paper the amount of CC and control named wizards have over an enemy team is far far superior.

You're laying it out in a really biased way. Yes, there are advantages of wizard CC over Hunter CC. But Hunter CC has advantages too. Different classes are different, and that's a good thing. Balance is not determined entirely by the amount of CC potential a class has, there are tons of other factors. Making simplistic comparisons (where you seem to forget significant benefits when it suits your argument) between abilities is not a good way to compare classes.

People should be careful what they wish for. Fear is very strong, yes--maybe too strong right now. But lots of people seem to be asking for more watered down bland homogenization. It's fine that classes have powerful strengths and weaknesses.

This is a tangent and not a reply to Mr Bigmoran:
The attitude that's going through the community of "I'm CCed? WHAT THE FUCK THIS IS BULLSHIT" is not healthy for the game. You're going to be CCed sometimes. Is it 100% balanced and never at all frustrating right now? No. But complaining about it in an unproductive manner just spreads the shitty attitude to more people. Especially if you're streaming to hundreds or thousands of people, this attitude and others (these people are so fucking bad, their classes are imba, etc) are a huge drag on our community. You shouldn't try to win arena games by lobbying your stream viewers to nerf your opponents. I am not innocent--I do this too sometimes, but the number of different negative attitudes, and their usage, seems to have gotten higher lately. We should all be aware of it, and try to stop.

Do Druids really need a CC as powerful as Cyclone in it's current implementation to be viable and to have synergy with other classes? If the answer to that is objectively "Yes," then I think the rest of the Druid skill set should be evaluated. My personal opinion is that even with Cyclone being nerfed, Druids still have enough unique traits and positive qualities (numerous hots, mobility, immune to poly, etc) that they will still be desirable and useful in the meta game. Maybe that's just the Druid hater in me, though.

I want to point out that the unique traits you listed that Druids would still have (HoTs, mobility, immune to poly) have all been getting given out to other healers in increasing amounts (except for immune to poly).

It seems like lots of people look at WoW as if it should be a graphical spreadsheet. A spreadsheet where everything is perfectly balanced and nothing really stands out. WoW is an RPG. It's interesting, and makes the game more worth playing, when classes are distinct and have sharp differences between them. Do Druids need a CC as powerful as Cyclone to be viable and have 'synergy'? No, obviously you could tweak the numbers such that Druids were even stronger without Cyclone than they are now.

I would make the argument that this hypothetical Cyclone-less WoW is less interesting and fun to play than an equally balanced WoW where Druids do have Cyclone. I think that's the point I've been trying to make (poorly) this entire thread. WoW is not just a graphical representation of a spreadsheet. WoW is a roleplaying game, and having powerful, unique abilities that give your class power is one of the most entertaining parts of an RPG (for me).

In the past, Priests used to be the offensive healer. They used to be able to help their DPS with damage, to a much greater extent than they can today. I think most Priests are sad that they lost that. You could have made the same argument then as you're making now: "Do Priests really need powerful damage to be viable and have synergy with other classes?" No, they don'tneed it, but differences make the game more interesting.

Every healer is slowly turning into a Paladin, and that should scare you.